Going Up

An interactive experiment in natural conversation

Born out of a curiosity to see how detailed a branching conversation can be, Going Up is a small anecdote of two guys stuck in a very slow lift. As one of the guys, you get to choose how the conversation goes: do you acknowledge the other man, or studiously ignore him?

Going Up is a game with deliberately small scale: there’s only a single location (a lift) and two characters (you and a stranger). The concept was to explore whether game conversations could be deeper than the usual good/bad/neutral setup seen in most RPGs, such as the Mass Effect series.

The reality has been quite sobering: even trying to create a sophisticated, branching dialogue for a single scene is very nearly overwhelming. Frankly, it’s a miracle that RPGs give you as much conversational freedom as they do.